Howard Zinn's Excerpt on Lupe Fiasco's "Introduction"

As a graduate of an International Relations major and a lover of music, I get so excited when the two merge in a moving way.
I love how Lupe Fiasco used an audio excerpt from a speech by historian Howard Zinn in the intro track his latest mixtape, Friend of The People.

So simply beautiful, honest and moving. Thank you Howard Zinn and Lupe Fiasco.

LYRICS:

[Howard Zinn]
We have to stop wars, we have to stop this war
And we have to get out the habit of war
It's more than a habit, it's an addiction
We have to get out of thinking that we must be a military superpower

We must get out of thinking that we must have military bases, as we have in a hundred countries
Is it possible that having military bases in a hundred countries arouses a lot of antagonism?
Is it possible that it promotes terrorism when your soldiers and your sailors are all over the world, occupying this country and that? Is it possible?

Why do we have to be a military superpower?
Why can't we be a humanitarian superpower?
Instead of sending planes with bombs
Why don't we send planes with food and medicine?

Seeking Out Music

I'm not the biggest fan of most mass-popularized commercial music (and no, I'm not one of those people that hate anything mainstream, I give credit where credit is due whether music is commercial or underground. I will write more on this topic another time). I also get bored of my music library quite fast, especially because I pretty much keep every single song I've liked since grade 6. Since I don't really like listening to anything on the radio or on TV, I've gotten pretty creative with the ways I get new music to listen to.

• When I first started getting into hip-hop, I really wanted to find new music but I didn't really know where to start without reading an entire anthology on hip-hop's greatest and their history. So I found a friend who was already familiar with the genre, and he generously offered to share some of his music library with me and gave me a huge chunk of songs with some of hip-hop's greatest. He had so many albums -- from Common, Talib,  ATCQ, Mos, Nas... to collection albums of notable songs in hip-hop. I put all of these songs into my iPod and my iTunes and slowly over time, I listened to most of them and remembered which ones I liked. I still owe my friend big time for that one, thanks @OT_Productions :)
• Another thing I do is listen to mixes by DJ's who had interesting song choices, and who highlighted songs that were not that well-known or not in the mainstream. One such DJ I really enjoyed listening to was @RONEJAXX because he would choose smooth and chill oldskool R&B tracks. Some of them were not that well known, and some of them I didn't listen to in 10 years. He's definetly the DJ to listen to if you want R&B smooth grooves. A great site to find DJ mixes is MixCloud, where you can choose DJ mixes and sets by genre/tags.
• YouTube is another great source for finding music. A lot of people curate playlists with a specific theme that you can listen to. So let's say I want to find new music by different female rappers that I might not have heard of before, I would do a YouTube search for "female rappers" or a name of a female rapper, and will find that at the bottom of the search results, there will be playlists that might show you what you are looking for. Bahamadia or Jean Grae might be included in playlists such as "My Favorite Hip Hop" or "Female Rappers". Then you can just click on the Female MC's playlist and play everything there until you find stuff that you like. One playlist I'm exploring these days is called Eargasm, you can listen to it here.
• Music blogs around the world give you access to music that you probably would never stumble upon. I follow a few music blogs that always give good recommendations. I've found random and great music on these kind of blogs; from interesting covers, to great live performances by artists, to just new stuff you never heard of before. It's even more interesting when you follow a blog that focuses on the music scene of another country (this is especially true for hip-hop which has a community, no doubt, in every corner of the globe). One blog that I really enjoy following is Soul11Music, they always recommend nice soulful tracks and R&B joints.

So that's how I find most of my music, really. Of course there are other useful ways like asking friends, listening to something someone recommended on their Twitter or Facebook page, or looking up the source of a sample. However, I find the ways I listed above to be more proactive in finding new music rather than letting it just come to you. Like I said, I get bored really fast with my music library so I have to actively go search for music!

I would love to hear how you find new and interesting music, so share your thoughts in the comments or on my Twitter page.

I'll leave you a song that I randomly found on Youtube the other day. Levitation (Ver 2.0) by Grooveman Spot which has some English rap and rap from a foreign language, I'm not really sure which. The beat is sooo relaxing!

Hiphop Vs America

I watched “Hip Hop Vs America” on YouTube the other day, a segment on BET about the controversy surrounding hip hop and asking if hip hop has lost its value/meaning over the years due to excessive commercialization. My favorite quote on the panel was from Dr Michael Eric Dyson, a Georgetown University Professor, who said:

“The litmus test for the authenticity of a particular artistic expression can never be the people who consume it. It has to be the issue of what you intend and therefore what its impact is. When you think about the fact that the institution of crime is America, the Kennedy’s, the famous families, the major capitalistic empires of American society predicated upon deceit, thievery, mendacity, and ribbon folk awe, hip hop at its best certainly will articulate something against that, but at its worst it reflects the very pathology of American society”.